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Summary
Summary
An enthralling, emotional memoir that recounts the ups and downs of coming-of-age, set against the music and literature of the 1970s.
Raised in a small town in the north of England known primarily for its cotton mills, football team, and its deep roots in the "Respectable Working Class," Graham Caveney armed himself against the confusing nature of adolescence with a thick accent, a copy of Kafka, and a record collection including the likes of the Buzzcocks and Joy Division. All three provided him the opportunity to escape, even if just in mind, beyond his small-town borders. But, when those passions are noticed and preyed upon by a mentor, everything changes.
Now, as an adult, Caveney attempts to reconcile his past and present, coming to grips with both the challenges and wonder of adolescence, music, and literature. By turns angry, despairing, beautifully written, shockingly funny, and ultimately redemptive, The Boy with Perpetual Nervousness is a tribute to the power of the arts--and a startling, original memoir that "feels as if it had to be written, and demands to be read" ( The Guardian UK ).
Author Notes
Graham Caveney has worked as a journalist, academic, and critic. Publications he has contributed to include NME, Q, Blitz and City Limits . He is the author of a memoir, The Boy with Perpetual Nervousness ; 'The Priest' They Called Him , a monograph on William Burroughs; Screaming with Joy , a monograph on Allen Ginsberg; and, with Elizabeth Young, of Shopping in Space: Essays on American 'Blank Generation' Fiction . He lives in Nottingham, UK.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Caveney (`The Priest¿ They Called Him) delivers a sharp, poignant memoir of anxiety and abuse. Growing up bookishly skittish in working-class 1970s northern England¿¿Writing about my working-class childhood feels like slipping on hand-me-down clothes¿¿Caveney nevertheless plots his own arc, while emboldening himself with the books of Kafka and the music of the Buzzcocks and Joy Division. The chronological plot of his youth is laid out in cinematic detail, including his mother¿s dinners of meat and mushy peas (¿food that is designed with insulation in mind¿) and his dalliances with revolutionary Marxism and capital-L Literature (¿I told her that after the revolution everyone would be a poet¿). But a shadowy fury underlies this nervous self-deprecation, borne out of his being raped as a teenager by a priest who groomed his insecurities with predatory calculation. As the memoir lurches forward in jaunts of youthful self-discovery and setbacks, Caveney writes with stabs of both fury and self-denial (¿This doesn¿t matter. It¿s not important. I¿m not even here¿) and anguished pleas to his abuser in order to make sense of it all. The result is an acidic, longing, and enraged memoir set to a postpunk soundtrack. (July)
Kirkus Review
A British journalist and critic tells the story of a working-class adolescence overshadowed by traumatic experiences with sexual abuse at the hands of a teacher.The son of northern English Catholic parents, Caveney (Screaming with Joy: The Life of Allen Ginsberg, 1999, etc.) was a "devout child" who didn't know he was working-class until he was in grammar school and "met people who weren't." He worked through his feelings of rejection and made friends with fellow outsiders. Together, they bonded over the music of Patti Smith, the Pretenders, and Joy Division while Caveney found personal solace in the novels of Kafka. As he grew up and became more critical of his world, he began to hate the "parochiality [and]lack of imagination" that characterized the people around him. His life changed drastically after he met "Rev. Kev," the rebel English teacher at his Catholic high school who "smoked pot'[and] was into Stevie Wonder." Drawn to Rev. Kev's culture and intelligence, Caveney regularly chatted with his teacher about books, ideas, and his hatred of the "small-souled petty-minded white working class." Their conversations led to a night out to the theater, which ended with the Rev. Kev's forcing himself on Caveney before taking him home. Unwilling to speak of that episode and of many similar ones that followed, the author kept the molestation a secret from his parents. The author ultimately broke free of his teacher's influence; but the helplessness and rage simmering just below the surface impacted almost every subsequent personal relationship he had. Even more devastatingly, it pushed the adult Caveney into "psych wards, rehabs, [and] therapists' offices" to find answers for the anguish that continued to torment him long after he left home. Despite its dark subject matter, the book is neither hopeless nor despairing thanks in large part to the author's mordant wit. Caveney seeks to understand pain and find redemption through the very act of surviving.Raw, compelling, and darkly lyrical. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Born in a small town in the north of England into what he calls the respectable working class, memoirist Caveney writes always affectingly and sometimes searingly of his childhood and adolescence, focusing on three things: first and central is his sexual abuse by his mentor, the charismatic priest known as Rev Kev, who was headmaster of his parochial school; second is his love of music, which provided a haven; and third is literature. A self-described bookish boy, he took refuge in the printed page. And, thanks to another teacher, he discovered that books were not (only) an escape from the world; they were an enrichment of it. Yet they were not enough to overcome the fallout of his adolescent abuse: his panic attacks, his becoming an alcoholic and drug addict, his suicide attempts, his agoraphobia. But these are aspects of his adult life that aside from the panic attacks are only manifested in teasing references. The focus remains on his coming-of-age and the keen insights he brings to it from his vantage of being a 50-year-old man. Through it all, Caveney writes beautifully: singer Patti Smith looked like a cross between Joan of Arc and Charlie Chaplin; I'm in love. It's terrible a bit like having stomach flu. Ultimately, though, it is not necessarily the writing but the raw emotion that remains with the reader, that and the hope for another volume of memoirs as memorable as this one.--Cart, Michael Copyright 2018 Booklist
Library Journal Review
Perhaps the most remarkable quality of this debut memoir by Caveney, author of monographs on Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, is the way in which he captures, through his prose, the feelings and experiences of a victim of sexual abuse. Here are the fragmentary memories, the disconnect from one's own body, the confusion, and the self-blame. The book starts out simply enough as a meditation on growing up bookish in working-class northern England. At the age of 14, Caveney enters a private Catholic school where he is taken under the wing of the headmaster. It quickly becomes clear what the headmaster's intentions toward Caveney are, and the inevitability of the abuse that follows is sickening to absorb. Verdict An angry and essential memoir about a topic not often discussed publicly: male victims of sexual abuse. Caveney also has a lot to say about the recuperative power of books and music.-Derek Sanderson, Mount Saint Mary Coll. Lib., Newburgh, NY © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness NEXT When a Person From Accrington (PFA) meets a Person Not From Accrington (PNFA), there will, at some point, be the following exchange: PNFA: So where are you from . . . ? PFA: Er . . . (either sheepishly or defiantly, embarrassed or proud) Accrington. PNFA: Oh . . . (delighted by their perspicacity) . . . Stanley . . . ! Accrington Stanley FC was indeed the only claim to fame that my hometown had when I lived there. Years later we would be able to add Jeanette Winterson and the actress Julie Hesmondhalgh to our roll call of Accrington's great and good, but in the seventies and early eighties, the folk memory of a founding first-division football team was as close to recognizable as Accrington got. When I first left home and went to university, I probably had a dozen such exchanges within the first day. Such was my annoyance that I tried to fudge it with a vague "Lancashire way," which only served to make me seem either evasive and furtive, as though I was on the run from the police, or dim and uncertain, like I'd just had a course of ECT. I tried amending my answer to "Manchester" for a while, mainly on the basis I had a northern accent and a record collection that contained the Buzzcocks, Joy Division, and Magazine. This would work until I actually met someone from Manchester, or anyone who had been to Manchester, or anyone who knew anything at all about Manchester. Within minutes I would be forced into mumbling something about "a town near to . . . er . . . cotton mills . . . close to Blackburn." Eventually I would blurt out "Accrington," they would say "Stanley" and another little bit of me would die. Quite why I took so vehemently against my hometown's football club I don't quite know. It's partly the name. Could we not have been a robust United or a stoical Town? "Stanley" made us sound as though the team consisted of one man, or, worse, eleven men all with the same name. It added to my sense that I wasn't from a place so much as a punch line to some unimaginative southern scriptwriter's joke. 1 Where you from? Accrington? Sorry to hear it. I did try on the football thing as a kid for a while. I decided that if supporting a football team was compulsory (and it felt as though it was), I would at least give it a perverse twist and support Burnley Football Club. My dad dutifully took me to Turf Moor (Burnley's Stadium). I still remember the chant--"Leighton James, Alan West, Martin Dobson, and the rest . . . na, na, na, na, na, na, na, ana"--sung by the Longside (Burnley's Football Club's supporters' end) with boozy exhilaration. I remember getting a hot pie and Bovril at halftime and scalding fat oozing out of the crust onto my paws. I remember thinking, as we stood behind the goal, how unfair it was that we had paid full price but only really got to see half a game, and wouldn't it be better if they used one end of the pitch rather than both. I remember the fence being charged, the one that separated the Away fans from the Home fans, and a chant going through the ground "A-G-R-O / A-G-R-O / Hello" to the sound of Gary Glitter's "Hello, Hello, I'm Back Again." I remember feeling sick and grabbing hold of my dad's hand and him telling me not to worry. I remember the chants getting louder--"You're gonna get your fucking head kicked in"; "You're goin' home in a fuckin' ambulance"--and sharpened coins and empty crisp bags filled with piss and crushed beer cans and darts all being thrown from one side of the railings to the next. Ah, the beautiful game. 1 Not just southerners, actually. There was a time when Coronation Street used Accrington as shorthand for a certain kind of existential dread. "A face like a wet Wednesday in Accrington" was one I remember. Excerpted from The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness: A Memoir by Graham Caveney All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
